End of an era End of an era (January 06, 2006)

Custom homes replacing sheep, barn atop Vintage Hills
by Jeb Bing

It's the end of an era for farmland along Crellin Road in upper Vintage Hills, where for many of the last 30 years families would take their kids to see the sheep and cattle.

The cattle were moved out long ago, but the sheep have been part of the local landscape until a few months ago when heavy machinery started contouring the last nine acres of their grazing land for 15 new homes that will be built later this year. The old barn, where the sheep found shelter at night, is all that's left of the farm, and it, too, will be disassembled in the next few months and moved to a site in Sunol where a buyer plans to restore it.

At one time, rancher and downtown businessman Chris Beratlis, who lives with his wife Glenda in a spacious ranch-style house on the peak of the farmland, leased several hundred acres of open space next to theirs. This included acreage that the school district sold off years ago where a new elementary school was to be relocated to serve any east side residential developments and long before Ruby Hill was built.

Where Beratlis' 50 head of cattle and 125 sheep once grazed, there are now $1 million-plus homes atop Vintage Hills that are part of the Vintage Heights I, Vintage Heights II and Foxbrough Estates communities. Montevino Drive now extends from Crellin to Vineyard Avenue through one of Beratlis' choice grazing sites.

"We had a good time up here when we were ranching and managing all those animals," Beratlis said, "but then came the developers."

The nine acres that are still vacant will be turned into half-acre lots that will be sold to individuals who will then contract with their own developer to build custom homes. Beratlis estimates that the lots alone will sell for $800,000 to $1.2 million once he completes the installation of water and sewer lines, utilities and streets this spring.

Chris and Glenda Beratlis are not your typical ranchers. Both Pleasanton-born and graduates of Amador Valley High School, they're city folks who have been part of Pleasanton's growth and development. Their two sons, Chris Jr. and David, also graduated from Amador along with 17 others in their immediate and extended family. Chris, Jr. owns and operates Beratlis Automotive at 3597 Nevada St. He and his wife Erika are parents of twins and will move into one of the new Beratlis Place homes when it's constructed later this year. David Beratlis was killed in an auto accident in 1990. He is buried at the Odd Fellows Memorial Gardens Cemetery, and Chris serves on a committee seeking city support and financing to buy the cemetery and beautify it. The parents also established the David Beratlis Memorial Scholarship at Amador which provides financial aid to graduates heading to college.

Chris Beratlis Sr., who is 70, said he always "had a hankering" for real estate. After graduating from Amador in 1953, he worked for a while for his parents, who emigrated here from Turkey, at a cheese-making plant they owned on Santa Rita Road. He used his earnings and self-acquired land acquisition expertise to invest in real estate, including a few lots on Main Street. Today his properties include Coffee Beans & Bistro, Alberto's, Pastas and others in the block north of Angela Street, and more buildings on Main Street north of the Union Pacific railroad tracks and near Amador High School.

He is also on the board of directors of the Pleasanton Downtown Association and recently chaired the PDA's Downtown Vitality Committee. He helped draft the Downtown Specific Plan that preserved the historical architecture of downtown while also working to improve the downtown streetscape and building improvements to attract new restaurants and retailers.

He has led the initiative to open more privately-owned downtown parking lots, including those he owns behind the restaurants, to the public.

Although a successful, well-known entrepreneur, Beratlis has also enjoyed ranching and the challenge of raising livestock as well as a family. As he has done in business, he and his wife also seized land acquisition opportunities, buying their Crellin Road hilltop acreage and building the family home in 1977. An aerial shot of their home at the time shows only a few similar ranch homes nearby.

They saw the potential development opportunities even then, as builders added new homes block by block up Kottinger Drive and Vineyard Avenue to Touriga Drive.

As those developments were built, the Beratlis ranch began shrinking, with Beratlis selling off the cattle first. Until last summer, the few remaining sheep still provided a thrill for children along Crellin and Crestablanca Drive. Many in the neighborhood were disappointed when Beratlis decided this past Christmas, for the first time in many years, to no longer decorate his barn with colored lights. Many parents took photos for Christmas cards of their children standing in front of the decorated barn with sheep grazing in the background, photos that are now part of those families' memory books.

But one view from the past won't change as the new custom homes fill in the last of the open field that once was the Beratlis ranchland.

"We'll still be in our home at the top of Beratlis Place," the couple said. "We're not going anywhere."

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